L'Empire Des Signes
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when one of the twentieth century's most brilliant minds turns his gaze upon an entirely foreign civilization? Roland Barthes' L'Empire des Signes — originally published in 1970 as part of the Skira Les Sentiers de la Création series — presents Japan not as a geographical or historical reality, but as a fictional system of signs, a country conjured entirely from its gestures, rituals, foods, and faces. Barthes chronicles his encounters with Japanese culture — the haiku, the packaging, the Bunraku puppet theatre, the empty centre of Tokyo — treating each as a fragment of a semiotic universe radically unlike the West's obsession with meaning and depth. A landmark work of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, L'Empire des Signes illustrates Barthes' signature method: the transformation of everyday cultural phenomena into rich intellectual provocations. Writing with elegant precision and playful curiosity, he argues that Japan offers the tantalising possibility of a world built on the signifier alone — where signs exist without the tyranny of an ultimate signified. This Flammarion Champs paperback edition makes one of the most seductive and cerebral works of French theory widely accessible, leaving the reader to wonder: can we ever truly read a culture that is not our own?
Author: Barthes
Format: Paperback
Genre: Essays
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when one of the twentieth century's most brilliant minds turns his gaze upon an entirely foreign civilization? Roland Barthes' L'Empire des Signes — originally published in 1970 as part of the Skira Les Sentiers de la Création series — presents Japan not as a geographical or historical reality, but as a fictional system of signs, a country conjured entirely from its gestures, rituals, foods, and faces. Barthes chronicles his encounters with Japanese culture — the haiku, the packaging, the Bunraku puppet theatre, the empty centre of Tokyo — treating each as a fragment of a semiotic universe radically unlike the West's obsession with meaning and depth. A landmark work of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, L'Empire des Signes illustrates Barthes' signature method: the transformation of everyday cultural phenomena into rich intellectual provocations. Writing with elegant precision and playful curiosity, he argues that Japan offers the tantalising possibility of a world built on the signifier alone — where signs exist without the tyranny of an ultimate signified. This Flammarion Champs paperback edition makes one of the most seductive and cerebral works of French theory widely accessible, leaving the reader to wonder: can we ever truly read a culture that is not our own?